Day: January 16, 2018

In the fall of 2016, Keegan Hankes, an analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, paid a visit to the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer. This was not unusual; part of Hankes’ job at the civil rights organization was to track white supremacists online, which meant reading their sites. But as Hankes loaded the page on his computer at SPLC’s headquarters in Montgomery, Alabama, something caught his eye: a pop-up window that announced “Checking your browser before accessing … Please allow up to 5 seconds.” In fine print, there was the cryptic phrase “DDoS protection by Cloudflare.” Hankes, who had worked at SPLC for three years, had no idea what Cloudflare was. But soon he noticed the pop-up appearing on other hate sites and started to poke around.

There’s a good chance that, like Hankes, you haven’t heard of Cloudflare, but it’s likely you’ve viewed something online that has passed through its system. Cloudflare is part of the backend of the internet. Nearly 10 percent of all requests for web pages go through its servers, which are housed in 118 cities around the world. These servers speed along the delivery of content, making it possible for clients’ web pages to load more quickly than they otherwise would. But Cloudflare’s main role is protection: Its technology acts as an invisible shield against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks—hacker campaigns that disable a website by overwhelming it with fake traffic. The company has more than 7 million customers, from individual bloggers who pay nothing for basic security services to Fortune 50 companies that pay up to a million dollars a year for guaranteed 24-hour support.

Hankes wanted to learn something about Cloudflare’s business, and what really interestedread more

China Builds ‘World’s Biggest Air Purifier’ That Actually Works
Published on January 16, 2018 at 11:50PM
The South China Morning Post shares an update on the status of an experimental tower in northern China, dubbed the world’s biggest air purifier by its operators. According to the scientist leading the project, the tower — which stands over 328 feet (100 meters) tall — has brought a noticeable improvement in air quality. From the report: The head of the research, Cao Junji, said improvements in air quality had been observed over an area of 10 square kilometers (3.86 square miles) in the city over the past few months and the tower has managed to produce more than 10 million cubic meters (353 million cubic feet) of clean air a day since its launch. Cao added that on severely polluted days the tower was able to reduce smog close to moderate levels. The system works through greenhouses covering about halfread more

Bitcoin Plunges Below $12,000 To Six-Week Low Over Crackdown Fears
Published on January 16, 2018 at 11:10PM
Bitcoin plunged to a six-week low Tuesday after comments from South Korea’s finance minister renewed worries about a crackdown in one of the largest markets for digital currency trading. In a radio program interview, South Korean Finance Minister Kim Dong-yeon said that “the shutdown of virtual currency exchanges is still one of the options” the government has. CNBC reports: Bitcoin dropped more than 17 percent to a low of $11,182.71 on Tuesday, falling below $12,000 for the first time since December 5, according to CoinDesk. CoinDesk’s bitcoin price index tracks prices from cryptocurrency exchanges Bitstamp, Coinbase, itBit and Bitfinex. As of 12:13 p.m. ET, bitcoin was trading more than 13 percent lower at $11,759.73 a coin, according to CoinDesk. Trading in South Korean won accounted for about 4 percentread more

Bitcoin Plunges Below $12,000 To Six-Week Low Over Crackdown Fears
Published on January 16, 2018 at 11:10PM
Bitcoin plunged to a six-week low Tuesday after comments from South Korea’s finance minister renewed worries about a crackdown in one of the largest markets for digital currency trading. In a radio program interview, South Korean Finance Minister Kim Dong-yeon said that “the shutdown of virtual currency exchanges is still one of the options” the government has. CNBC reports: Bitcoin dropped more than 17 percent to a low of $11,182.71 on Tuesday, falling below $12,000 for the first time since December 5, according to CoinDesk. CoinDesk’s bitcoin price index tracks prices from cryptocurrency exchanges Bitstamp, Coinbase, itBit and Bitfinex. As of 12:13 p.m. ET, bitcoin was trading more than 13 percent lower at $11,759.73 a coin, according to CoinDesk. Trading in South Korean won accounted for about 4 percentread more

American and Japanese astronauts aboard the International Space Station will embark on a pair of spacewalks Jan. 23 and 29 to service the station’s robotic arm. Experts from NASA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) will preview this work in a briefing at 2 p.m. EST Thursday, Jan. 18, at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

There are ways to protect yourself when using an Android Device, and in general, your phone will do the work to stay safe for you. But, some malware can try to trick you into installing it, and from there, all bets are off. A recently discovered bit of malware tries to do just that, and once its implanted on your device, it can do some serious spying.

Kaspersky Lab discovered the malware, which it named Skygofree, late last year, and has learned a lot about how it tries to get onto Android devices, and what it’s capable of once implanted. Kaspersky Lab described it as “one of the most powerful spyware tools that we have ever seen for this platform.”

Kaspersky Lab believes Skygofree has been in development since 2014, and has evolved considerably since then. It has a wide variety of spying capabilities, some of which haven’t been seen before.

The Skygofree malware can get onto users devices after they visit a fake website posing as another. An example Kasperskyread more

Bitcoin Plunges Below $12,000 To Six-Week Low Over Crackdown Fears
Published on January 16, 2018 at 11:10PM
Bitcoin plunged to a six-week low Tuesday after comments from South Korea’s finance minister renewed worries about a crackdown in one of the largest markets for digital currency trading. In a radio program interview, South Korean Finance Minister Kim Dong-yeon said that “the shutdown of virtual currency exchanges is still one of the options” the government has. CNBC reports: Bitcoin dropped more than 17 percent to a low of $11,182.71 on Tuesday, falling below $12,000 for the first time since December 5, according to CoinDesk. CoinDesk’s bitcoin price index tracks prices from cryptocurrency exchanges Bitstamp, Coinbase, itBit and Bitfinex. As of 12:13 p.m. ET, bitcoin was trading more than 13 percent lower at $11,759.73 a coin, according to CoinDesk. Trading in South Korean won accounted for about 4 percentread more